Yesterday, The Wall Street Journal announced SFI Chair Emeritus Bill Miller the winner of its quarterly contest for best-performing U.S. stock fund over a 12-month period. This is the third time in a decade that the “stock-picking legend” has won The Wall Street Journal’s Winner’s Circle contest, this time for his Miller Opportunity Trust (LMOPX) mutual fund.

Miller, who has been involved with SFI since the mid-1990’s, credits SFI science for his unique perspective on markets. “The economy and capital markets are complex adaptive systems,” Miller says. “The best way to understand them is through the work done by the scientists at the Santa Fe Institute.”

At SFI, Miller oversees and supports two initiatives that push the high-risk, high-reward research that characterizes the Institute. The Miller Omega Program (Mu Omega Pi) supports deep thinking in uncertain research areas that, if they should prove correct, could lead to a significant transformation in our understanding of complex phenomena. To catalyze transdisciplinary scholarship, the Miller Scholarship offers financial support for highly accomplished creative thinkers who wish to visit SFI a few months to a year.

"Bill and Samantha and their team are showing the world what a deep-investment philosophy based on rigorous ideas can do," says SFI President David Krakauer. "It is amazing work that proves that predictive insight emerges from the distillation of complex phenomena combined with the application of sound judgment.” 

The Wall Street Journal reports that the Miller Opportunity Trust, which Miller runs with Samantha McLemore, his fellow portfolio manager, “beat its nearest rival by nearly 6 percentage points, with a return for the 12 months ended June 30 of 48.55%.”

Read the article, “And the No. 1 Stock Fund Is… Miller Opportunity Trust wins with a 48.55% gain for 12 months,” in The Wall Street Journal (July 10, 2017)

Read the article, "The Unreformed Stock Picker: Without A Boss, Bill MIller Is Betting On Amazon, Bitcoin, And Bob Dylan," in Forbes (July 18, 2017)